


Eyes Full of Sky

by glittercracker



Category: Hunter X Hunter
Genre: Fluff, M/M, Reunion, teeny bit of angst but more fluff, to say more would be to ruin it!
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-31
Updated: 2020-03-31
Packaged: 2021-02-23 04:06:49
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,449
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23405491
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/glittercracker/pseuds/glittercracker
Summary: Gon and Killua are recently reunited on Whale Island, but how will two 16 year olds with a lot of feelings and no experience expressing them make it through the visit intact?
Relationships: Gon Freecs/Killua Zoldyck
Comments: 23
Kudos: 198





	Eyes Full of Sky

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the Downtime companion mini-zine, "Serendipity". Thanks to @fireolin and @losing_sanity_fast for the edits!

They’d been dancing around it for two weeks.

Four years and two weeks, arguably, but the two weeks were unquestionable. That was how long Killua had been back in Gon’s life: not as a net message or phone call or even a rare video call, but as a real, living, breathing person. A person who had grown a foot and spoke with a deeper voice since the last time they were face to face, though his smile remained as sweetly reticent and his blushes as easily provoked. 

It had taken Gon days to get over his initial awe. For so long Killua had been a creature of memory, softened by time like Gon’s third-generation bedsheets. But the Killua who stepped off the boat was a patchwork, the familiar intercut with fabric too foreign and shiny to face head-on. 

A few days had smoothed the edges of this disconnect, but also presented an entirely new problem. Familiarity breeds contempt—Gon couldn’t remember where he had read that, but he begged to differ. There was nothing of contempt in what he felt for Killua now that the simple cadences of island life had worked the stiffness from their initial reunion. Instead, he saw clearly what he had only glimpsed through scrim and shadow when they’d parted on the last precipice of childhood: Killua was, as Whale Islanders put it, the heart of his heart. 

But what Killua felt? That was anyone’s guess. 

*

  
Killua was miserable. 

The moment he’d set eyes on Gon, waiting on the worn, wooden quai, he had known that he’d badly misjudged this meeting. Misjudged himself. He had known that he wouldn’t step right back into Gon’s life as if they hadn’t spent two years apart. But he had never once imagined that Gon’s eyes, his smile—still bright, but with a new cast of hesitancy—would deliver him a gut-punch hefty as anything he’d faced in a fight.

He’d thought that his childhood crush on his best friend was long since past, and he had been right: what he’d felt when he’d stepped off the boat and into Gon’s warm embrace wasn’t a crush. It was the love he’d denied for so long, vast and intractable as water bursting from a fractured dam. Every day that passed in the presence of this new Gon—still charming, still joyful, but also given now to thoughtful silences and wistful half-smiles—his old friend wrapped himself more tightly around Killua’s heart, until he knew that there would be no breaking free.

None, at least, that would leave him intact.

But what Gon felt? Who knew? Killua had to laugh at the irony when he found himself wishing, at the beginning of his third week on Whale Island, that Gon was still the child who spoke whatever was in his mind and heart the moment it landed there.

But he wasn’t that child anymore. And it only made him love Gon more. 

  
  
*

  
Asking Killua point-blank how he felt, as Gon might once have done, was out of the question. He cringed when he considered the things he had said in the past to his very private friend. The way that he’d ploughed through Killua’s embarrassment as if it didn’t exist… or didn’t matter. 

No; he’d never thought that. But like so much in their lives when they’d first known each other, he hadn’t really thought about it at all. He’d acted on instinct and emotion, and everyone knew how that had turned out.

Gon knew that he could never be so thoughtless with Killua again. But he also knew that he couldn’t stay silent much longer. For one thing, it was exhausting. For another, Killua had a ticket back to the mainland in a week, and Gon couldn’t let him get on that boat without telling him how he felt, even if it changed their friendship forever. He had wondered and regretted and ached through too many lonely nights to bear not knowing where they stood any longer.

But how to ask? Killua wouldn’t like a grand gesture. He wouldn’t want other people around for this conversation, even in the background. He probably wouldn’t even want to look Gon in the eye while Gon spilled his heart. Gon considered a midnight picnic, a repeat of their nights spent stargazing the first time Killua had visited his home. 

And then he had a better idea.

  
*

  
“Killua, I want to take you somewhere today,” Gon said after breakfast on the second morning of Killua’s final week on the island.

“Yeah?” Killua said, looking up from the dishes they were washing together, and then blushing at how eager he sounded. He looked away, heart constricting. “You do that every day.”

“This is someplace new.” Gon smiled at him as if Killua might pluck it from his face, crush it underfoot. 

Or was that only wishful thinking on Killua’s part, that his reaction would matter to Gon so much? “Okay. Does it require formal wear?” he asked to keep himself from considering that question, or staring down the double-free falls of answers.

Gon laughed. “No. It just requires you to be quiet.”

Killua looked up. “Quiet?”

“You’ll see.”

Right, Killua thought. And I hope that whatever I see isn’t the end of me. Because he was dangerously close to falling past the point of retrieving himself—if he hadn’t already.

  
*

  
Gon caught Killua’s arm as he slipped on a slope slick with fallen leaves. Killua pulled away, reddening.

“Why won’t you tell me where we’re going?” he asked as they pushed on through thick undergrowth, vines hanging snakelike from the forest canopy.

“Because that would ruin it,” Gon told him, brushing aside a spill of moss and startling a cloud of brilliant blue butterflies. They rose through a column of sunlight like snippets of dream.

“You’re making me nervous,” Killua said.

And I’m so nervous I could almost take flight with them, Gon thought, watching the luminous insects ascend. “I’ll tell you this,” Gon said when they were gone. A finger of sunlight penetrated the thick leaves above, spinning Killua’s wild hair to a bright halo, seeming to light his eyes from within. Gods. Gon drew a breath. “We’re going stargazing.” As if I needed to, with you standing there like that. 

“Gon. It’s barely noon.” 

Gon smiled. “Trust me,” he said, as if that weren’t the crux of all of this.

  
*

  
Killua peered doubtfully into a cave mouth nearly hidden by thick foliage. A steam ran into it, swift and clear over pale stones. Gon sat to pull off his shoes. 

“Just the shoes?” Killua asked, hearing the double-meaning a moment too late.

Gon looked up at him with a speculative smile. “Yes,” he said, after a too-long beat of silence, “just the shoes.”

Killua sat, pulled off his shoes and socks and set them by Gon’s. Gon had stepped into the stream. “Come on,” he said, extending a hand to Killua. “The first part of the way is very dark. You don’t have to hold my hand, but—” Killua took it, pale fingers closing around Gon’s golden ones.

Gon’s smile faltered for a moment. He turned his face away, but not before Killua caught the brickdust flush on his tanned cheeks, the shy delight in his eyes before his lashes dipped. And then he tugged, and Killua followed him out of the birdsung noontime, into the quiet dark.

  
*

  
Gon’s hot cheeks cooled in the damp, but his hand was warm in Killua’s, the long fingers curled around his own pulsing with life and the slightest twinge of electricity. Or was it? For all the ways in which Killua surpassed other people, he was also a sixteen-year-old boy. So maybe, maybe that wasn’t residual electricity Gon felt at all, but an all-but-suppressed shiver of nerves. And maybe it was wrong that that thought should calm his own, but it did.

His knees, now deep in the freezing water, bumped up against smooth, worn wood. There was just enough residual light from the cave’s mouth to see the outline of the old boat—enough not to stumble when he climbed into it. But for that, he had to let go of Killua’s hand. Regrettably inevitable. 

“Gon, what is this?” Killua asked, one hand on the boat’s gunwale as Gon untied the painter and then reached up for a rope that ran along the cave’s wall, green with moisture and age. With it, and with his island-child’s sea-legs, he steadied the boat’s rocking.

“Get in,” Gon said, “and then be quiet. You have to be quiet, or the stars won’t show.” 

“Are you okay?”

Gon grinned. “Trust me!” he said again, and this time his voice was unwavering.

  
*

  
Killua steadied the boat and climbed in, sat down on the sagging plank seat. Gon began to pull them forward with the rope, rounding a bend that shut out the last of the light. Killua felt a moment of panic. Complete lack of light always came with that moment for him, born of childhood half-memories of pain followed by seclusion in a hard cold blackness where no one answered his cries.

It’s Gon, he told himself. There is always light when he’s with me. And despite the past, despite the times he’d doubted whether Gon could break free of the darkness he’d wrought, this was, he found, entirely true. Any lingering streaks of the old betrayal and guilt had burned away in the sunshine of the past two weeks. Of his smiles, and his silences, and the way he looks at me when he thinks I’m sleeping—

Then Killua’s mind fell silent. Because they had rounded another bend in the stream, and all at once, the dark was full of stars.

  
*

  
As the darkness parted Gon let the rope drop. They had come to a cavern with the ceiling of a temple, rising up and up until it disappeared into its own twists and turns, every inch of it covered with what looked like pale green stars. They spread upward in alien constellations, shedding a soft glow over the still black water.

Killua gazed at them, his eyes wide and rapt as a child’s, a small, soft smile on his lips. Gon sat down across from him, looking up as well. A few of the lights blinked out at the sound of the rocking boat and then, as they sat very still, gradually came back to life.

“What—” Killua began, and then clapped his hand over his mouth as his voice reverberated in the wide, empty cavern and swathes of lights blinked out again.

He looked at Gon, stricken, but Gon smiled back at him, put a finger to his lips until the lights came back on. Then, leaning close, he whispered into Killua’s ear, “They’re glow-worms. They’re afraid of noise, it makes them go dark.”

Killua gazed at them for a moment longer, and then he turned to Gon with a halting smile and eyes full of sky. He reached out with a trembling hand, and there was no possibility this time that his nen was the cause. His hand hovered by Gon’s cheek for a moment, and then, with the gentlest of touches, he laid it there.

Gon gazed at him for a moment through wide eyes, and then, shocking them both, he gasped out a sob.

  
*

  
“Gon?” Killua said, dropping to his knees in front of his friend, not caring that the lights around them extinguished. He made to pull his hand away but Gon clutched it close, leaning into it. Carefully, Killua brought his other hand to Gon’s other cheek. “Why are you crying?”

“Because I don’t know how to say good-bye to you.” More and more lights gone, galaxies swallowed into a vast black emptiness, though Gon’s voice was so soft and so broken that it was almost lost in the watery hush.

Killua froze. What? Hadn’t his coming back here meant anything? “You want me to go?”

“No!”

“Then why the good-bye?” 

“How can I ask you to stay with me after what happened before?” 

Oh. Killua sighed. “Gon, you were a child.”

“I’m still the same person.”

“Yes. And no. But more to the point, you weren’t the only one who messed up.”

“You did nothing wrong.”

Killua let out a bitter rasp of a laugh. “Gods, Gon. I did nothing right!”

“Killua?” Gon asked, with a shuddering breath.

Killua tugged him forward until they were pressed together between the seats of the little boat. “You were always so generous with your heart, and telling me what was in it. And I never, ever told you what was in mine.”

“You didn’t have to. I knew I was your best friend.”

Killua sighed. “You were a lot more than that, Gon. You are a lot more than that.”

“I—am?”

Killua nodded.

“What do you—”

Killua put a finger to Gon’s lips. Gon raised his eyebrows, questioning.

Heart pounding, Killua said, “I don’t want to have this conversation in the dark.” 

“But how can we have any conversation without—”

Once again, Killua hushed him. The two of them sat in silence as the echoes died away and slowly, the glow-worms came back to life. When there was enough light again to see Gon’s face, Killua turned to him. His eyes were wide, unblinking, a question rippling their surface. And Killua wasn’t sure what he had been afraid of all this time because really, when Gon looked at him like that, there was only one answer. There had only ever been one answer, if he’d just known enough to recognize the question.

He wove his fingers into Gon’s thick hair, and Gon’s head tilted toward him, his lips parted. I should really ask, Killua thought hazily, knowing that it was already too late for that. He couldn’t even feel remorse, because if he had asked, he would have missed the look on Gon’s face the moment he understood: wide-eyed disbelief blossoming into the most beautiful smile he had ever seen as Killua leaned forward and kissed him.

  
*

  
Gon kissed him. And kissed him and kissed him until they had to stop to breathe. His heart skittered like the handfuls of light cast across the rippling water around them, and he realized that all of his life, he’d had the meaning of “joy” entirely wrong. 

“Killua?” Gon asked, so soft and so close that the lights never flickered. 

“Yeah Gon?” Killua whispered back into the warm sliver of space between them.

“Does this mean it’s okay if I stay with you? By your side, always?” Killua’s eyes widened, and Gon’s heart faltered.

Then Killua smiled, wide and sweet. “There’s nothing I’d like more.” 


End file.
